Volume 47, Number 11 · June 29, 2000
Born Again in Rome
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture
by Leonard Barkan
Yale University Press, 428 pp., $35.00
The ancient Romans themselves were never quite sure whether their city's true population consisted of statues or people. In the city's imperial heyday, there must have been more than a million of both, each group as colorfully motley as the other. Upon a Senatus populusque Romanus that hailed from Britain, Africa, India, and everywhere in between, old Etruscan terra cottas smiled with enigmatic cheer; Olympic victors, gods, and rulers looted from Greece stared through their mother-of-pearl eyes from brazen faces. Egyptian pharaohs and reclining lions of gloss black basalt bore their exile with calm bemusement, although a portrait of Julius Caesar in the same material (now in Rome's Museo Barracco) instead immortalizes the man's high-strung charisma.
Review, 3054 words
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